Politics Made Me Do It

By Robert Wright

(TIME, February 2) -- There was a time, long before the age of John Kennedy and Bill
Clinton, when world leaders didn't risk their careers
surreptitiously pursuing sex. They pursued it openly and
risklessly. The Roman biographer Suetonius had this to say about
the Emperor Augustus: "His friends used to behave like Toranius,
the slave dealer, in arranging his pleasures for him--they would
strip grown girls of their clothes and inspect them as though
they were for sale."

In ancient China, imperial gratification was a tidier affair. An
Emperor in the Chou dynasty had 37 wives and 81 concubines.
Harem administrators kept track of menstrual cycles, scheduling
sex at each woman's peak fertility.

The anthropologist Laura Betzig, surveying these early
civilizations, has rendered the Darwinian opinion that politics
has often been "little more than reproductive competition"--men
using power to better spread their genes. The Aztec King
Nezahualpilli had more than 100 children, as did Ramses II of
Egypt.

It is thus ironic that a leading brand of condom bears the
Egyptian King's name, but there is an even larger condom-related
puzzle. If Betzig is correct, then why, in this age of
contraceptives, do politicians keep philandering? Where's the
"reproductive competition" in a fruitless tryst?

The answer from evolutionary psychology is that men are still
saddled with urges that evolved in our precontraceptive
hunter-gatherer past. More sex with more females meant more
offspring, so genes giving males a thirst for sex with a variety
of partners (especially young, hence quite fertile, partners)
flourished. So did genes inspiring men to pursue the social
status that tends to attract partners. In a sense, then, the
very purpose of the power that Presidents Clinton and Kennedy
spent their life amassing was to expand their sex life. Can we
really blame a guy for doing what's natural? There are two basic
answers.

One is to say, while "natural" doesn't mean "good," it may mean
"hard to resist." A male potentate's lust is not just stronger
than most women can appreciate but also stronger than most men
can appreciate. Few of us regularly encounter fawning, nubile
women, laughing at our every joke, sighing at our every insight,
curious about our every distinguishing characteristic. The
temptation fostered by such adoration is "designed"--by natural
selection--to be powerful.

And succumbing to it can be addictive. Such pleasurable
neurotransmitters as dopamine, now implicated in drug
dependency, weren't created by Mother Nature to boost cocaine
sales, after all. Their natural function is to reinforce habits
that helped our ancestors survive and reproduce, such as eating
and fornicating. Though few men share an alpha male's
opportunities for sexual addiction, any smoker who has kicked
the habit rather than die young, only to then fall off the
wagon, knows the mighty logic that can make a presidency
self-destruct.

Given the power of such biological forces, should we forgive the
indiscretions of politicians? Maybe. But there is a quite
different answer, also rooted in the human past.

The funny thing about most ancient civilizations is that they
weren't very civilized. They carried the law of the jungle to
new heights, using the machinery of the state to gratify the
strong on an epic scale and keep the weak at bay. Inca nobility
had "houses of virgins," each stocked with hundreds of women,
but if a man of lesser lineage sought a piece of the
action--seduced one of these women or a king's cloistered female
kin--the man, his family and everyone in his village would be
killed.

Indeed, Betzig has observed, in general, rulers with the most
sexual perks have been the most brutal. Thus sexual license,
though stereotypically linked with permissive liberals, has
often been an enemy of the left, a tool of class oppression. The
oppression needn't be violent. While the Aztec King Montezuma II
is said to have possessed 4,000 women, and all noblemen got as
many as they could afford, "an ordinary Indian," a Franciscan
friar noted, "could scarcely find a woman when he wished to
marry."

A cherished feature of modern times is the idea that the rich
and powerful aren't special. Upper-class men aren't supposed to
hoard women, treating them as chattel and sexually
disfranchising poorer men. More generally, the rich face the
same legal and moral strictures as everyone else. We've tried,
at least, to take the alpha out of the alpha male (and alpha
female).

Obviously, we haven't succeeded. The rich and poor aren't truly
equal before the law, for example. Still, we've come a long way.
And if there is anyone whose job it is to symbolize our
aspiration for further progress, to refrain from the naturally
self-indulgent use of power, it's the President of the U.S.
Especially, perhaps, a President who is liberal and thus holds
that the privileged shouldn't exercise their various appetites
untrammeled.

This may be too idealistic. But occasionally we do see a
politician who offers hope that the millenniums-old drift toward
civilized behavior can continue. Who knows? Maybe posterity will
see John Kennedy and Bill Clinton, the smooth-talking
jet-setters, as relics of the ancient past and Jimmy Carter, the
Bible-quoting peanut farmer who lusted only in his heart, as a
man of the future.